Coming Next Week: Facilities Recommendation to School Board, Ensure Your Voice is Heard

On or about Thursday, June 16, 2011, FCPS Facilities staff will post their recommended solution to AHS overcrowding to the School Board’s website. The recommended solution will be introduced as “new business” at the School Board meeting on June 23 (7:00 p.m., Luther Jackson MS). Once the recommended solution has been released, the only way to make a change to the solution is for the School Board members to agree to amend the solution. The recommended solution may be any of the four options currently on the table or a combination of some or all of them. There will be no community feedback meetings after the release of the recommended solution.


What Can You Do?

1. Send an e-mail to the School Board members and Facilities staff to make your voices heard. Please be respectful in your comments. The School Board listens to specific, factually supported comments and suggested solutions rather than emotional argument. We recommend you support a particular solution and back it up with sound reasoning instead of just opposing any change. Many of the issues are discussed from our perspective on our web page. If you have already sent a letter or e-mail, we ask you to, please, send another outlining your position and your support.  Click here to send an e-mail to the School Board members and Facilities staff.
2. Sign up to speak at the public hearings, which will be held on Monday and Tuesday, July 11 and 12, at 6pm at Luther Jackson MS. To reserve a space on the speaker’s lists, you can sign up online starting on June 17 or call the School Board Office at 571-423-1075 from 8 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. The speakers list will close at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, July 8. Each speaker is given 3 minutes. Students get to speak first no matter when they sign up.
3. Be aware of other upcoming events: (a) School Board Work Session, at which the recommended solution will be discussed on Monday, July 18 (time TBA); and (b) final School Board action on this matter on Thursday, July 28 at 7:00 p.m. at Luther Jackson MS.

If you believe Option 2 is the best solution, here are some points you may want to consider in your message:

• It moves a sufficient number of children to relieve the overcrowding in the long-term.
• Option 2 best meets the requirements of School Board Policy 8130.
• Option 2 alleviates the overcrowding at AHS by using existing capacity at neighboring schools.
• Option 2 demonstrates even HS capacity across the region, ranging from 88.5% (Edison) to 105.3% (Stuart) whereas Option 3 ranges from 83% (Woodson) to 102.6% (Stuart).
• Approximately 70% of the WFES area is physically closer to Frost and Woodson than to LBSS. The transportation routes are already set in that buses to Frost and Woodson currently run through our neighborhoods.
• Woodson HS has a program capacity of 2,339 and requires approximately 570 incoming freshman per year to reach that enrollment but Frost currently sends fewer than 500 as the sole middle school feeder to Woodson HS.
• Option 2 will add only 12 children to the current enrollment of 1,049 at Frost and is scheduled for renovation in 6-7 years to increase its capacity. Frost design capacity (core building facilities such as the cafeteria, library and gymnasium) is 1,062 students (equal to 2016-17 projected enrollment). Frost’s program capacity (based on classroom usage) is 864, nearly 200 fewer students than its design capacity.
• Wakefield Forest ES is the only K-6 school in FCPS to enter a 6-8 middle school (Poe). Option 2 solves this inconsistency by sending WFES students to a 7-8 middle school (Frost). It eliminates two attendance islands and a split-feeder and reconfigures one K-5 school to a K-6.

Option 1 does not remove a sufficient number of students from AHS to allow for the projected enrollment, let alone the predicted population surge in downtown Annandale (2010 US Census). NOTE: AHS design capacity is 2,179 according to FCPS Dashboard and AHS will exceed this at 110% within five years; AHS program capacity (2,350) exceeds design by 171 students.

Option 3 requires students to be transported through two of the most dangerous intersections in the West Springfield Police District: (a) Braddock Road and Burke Lake Road, and (b) Burke Lake Road and Rolling Road.

Option 4 merely reshuffles the population within the subject area, resulting in a 105.6% capacity at Poe, and 133.2% at Holmes MS by the 2016-2017 school year, while AHS, at a projected 76.8%, would be severely underutilized.